CollaborativEye

Why aren't there any books on how to ride a bike? (OK -- I found one on Amazon, but work with me...) You can read and learn from books on molecular biology, cost accounting, and computer programming, so why not something as simple as learning to ride a bicycle? The truth is, you don't really KNOW how to ride a bike, until you've been on it, fallen off a few times, and become personally engaged with the bike. Philosopher Michael Polanyi called this "Personal Knowledge" in his ground breaking book of the same title back in 1958. Fast forward 50 years to several McKinsey studies in which three types of knowledge interactions as posited: transformational, transactional, and tacit. Transformational interactions change raw materials into finished goods; transactional interactions involve knowledge which can be codified and explained as a process or set of steps (e.g closing the books for the month, or entering sales data into a CRM system). Tacit interactions, on the other hand, are much more complex, ambiguous, and involve what Polanyi called personal knowledge. Tacit knowledge requires judgement, context, and interaction with others to determine the best solution. For example, how should you respond to an irate customer? What features should be included in the next release of product X? Which logo treatment is best? What investment fund is most appropriate for this customer?

McKinsey research indicates that 70% of all jobs created since 1998 involve tacit knowledge interactions as their primary component. However, only 24% of software spending is aimed at improving tacit knowledge interactions! No wonder we feel that we are getting further behind even though we have more and more technology at our disposal!

The implications of tacit knowledge on business cannot be overstated. Organizations which successfully improve the productivity and effectiveness of their tacit knowledge workers will be able to build competitive advantage which will be difficult for others to copy. There will be no "play book" to copy -- rather the competitive advantage is built into the tacit interactions between employees, customers, partners and the ability to innovate and come to the right solution to a problem more quickly.  How can business leaders improve their organization's tacit knowledge effectiveness?

1) By providing the tools where interactions and collective knowledge are encouraged and preserved.  Technology examples include collaboration platforms such as blogs, wikis, instant messaging, knowledge management platforms, etc. The goal is to make collaboration  so simple and pain free that it increases meaningful, shared communication dramatically. And no, email is obviously not the answer.

2) Exploring communication platforms that can capture experience, context, and nuanced judgement more successfully than stand-alone text. For example, listening to a set of successful conversations between a customer service rep and an irate customer may be much more effective than reading a 10 page paper on customer service protocol. Or another example, providing tutorials on the use of a CRM system which show exactly how to perform an operation, complete with screen recordings, and audio narration discussing possible exceptions, alternate approaches, and considerations.   

3) Clear the decks for more tacit knowledge interaction by reducing the burden of transactional interactions. Very little time should be spent learning how to fill out an expense form or learning how to run a monthly report in the ERP system. Companies must provide focused, on-demand learning that provides employees with transactional knowledge when and where they need it.

We all know by now that social networking technology, collaboration, and "wikinomics"-thinking works. There are still some naysayers, but their arguments are wearing thin. However, there are limits to collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds and understanding these limits is just as important as understanding the potential. So when does collective intelligence just plain not work?

Interestingly, as far as I know, all the books extolling the virtues of Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration 2.0, and your-favorite-term-here-2.0, were written by one or two authors rather than hundreds or thousands. These authors created a position, gathered support, did the research, created drafts, and pushed the writing project through. We are Smarter than Me tried to break this pattern and use the concepts that the authors write about in the creation of the book. But they concede that part-way through the project "...we found the actual text of the book, the flow of the topics, and the graphical design had to be produced in the conventional way, rather than relying on the crowd to perform these functions." (pg. xiv) I applaud Barry Liebert and Jon Spector for their candor. Why the breakdown?

Before we answer, the same book provides another example of "collective intelligence gone wild". TheBusinessExperiment.com (TBE) was created to harness collective intelligence for the incubation and creation of businesses. Interaction was good during the idea creation and refinement stage, but when an actual project was chosen to work on, the wheels fell off. Most people lost interest, and getting any real work done was difficult to impossible. A "traditional" leadership was created, with a CEO who quickly drove the project forward. Again, why the breakdown?

I think these examples provide important reminders that collaboration and collective intelligence still require leadership, albeit leadership of a different kind. The role of such leadership?

1) From Jim Collins of Good to Great fame:  Get the right people on the bus (and correspondingly get the wrong people off the bus). TBE founder Rob May noted that inviting people to vote on ideas attracted people who liked to discuss ideas rather than people interested in the actual idea itself. In application, this means that leadership needs to chose a specific direction or plan (hopefully applying collaborative principles in the idea creation, vetting, and refinement process), and then amass the right team to make the initiative a reality. The actual implementation, once passionate people are on board, can again utilize collective intelligence.

2) "2.0" leadership still requires the hard work of translating an idea into a plan. Leadership must create a vision around the plan, sell that vision, and  set goals. That plan must include some type of work-breakdown-structure to give concrete things for people who are "on the bus" to sink their teeth into. The size of tasks is important: too big and the task is too open-ended to realistically develop in a collaborative, distributed manner. On the other hand, the task cannot be too small or progress will grind to a halt.

My goal in this post is not to say that collaboration doesn't work. Far from it. As we evolve in collaboration maturity, we will see failed experiments from which we must learn. Understanding the limitations in a concept is crucial to appropriate and most effective application of that concept. Collaborative leadership understands these limitations and knows how to strike the right balance between top-down decision making and collaborative wisdom. Further, collaborative leadership must be willing to explore where that balance is.

We all intuitively know that smaller groups seem to operate more efficiently, but why? Malcolm Gladwell refers to the concept of transactive memory in The Tipping Point, referring to the work of psychologist Daniel Wegner from the University of Virginia. Simply put, transactive memory is based on the idea that individuals can provide external memory for each other. In the example of a married couple, the husband may not pay attention to the yard care equipment since he knows that his wife handles this area of the household; the wife may in turn rely on the husband for detailed information regarding the computers in the house. This enables the couple to handle more information as a team, since they don't both need to try and remember everything necessary to run the household.

The ability to manage transactive memory gets more difficult as the size of the organization increases. In the example of a married couple, it is obviously easy to track who is the keeper of specific information: either the husband or the wife. Although larger organizations may have more total knowledge available, it is often very difficult to tap into that knowledge, and the cost to mine the knowledge often outweighs the gain from the knowledge itself. Gladwell discusses Gore Associates (the makers of Gore-Tex) and their management of transactive memory by limiting operational units to 150 people. He quotes a Gore associate: "It's not just do you know somebody. It's do you really know them well enough that you know their skills and abilities and passions. That's what you like, what you do, what you want to do, what you are truly good at." (The Tipping Point, page 190). 

How can organizations develop their transactive memories? An obvious area to consider is size of operational units. Gladwell mentions several other examples which indicate 150 as a "magic" upper limit on organizational size. However, I believe that collaboration tools, and particularly social networking tools may be very useful in helping to develop transactive memory, even in larger organizations. How can organizations help their employees to connect and get more in depth knowledge of each others strengths, weakness, passions, etc? Is time spent reading each others blogs (even our personal blogs), really wasted time for the organization? Rather than viewing social networking tools as time sinks, leaders should instead consider how to encourage their employees to connect with each other more frequently, and at a deeper level. Such organizational knowledge enables incredible efficiency and rapid innovation: instead of endless meetings to manage turf wars, and assign and monitor tasks, the organization will in a sense be able to self-organize quickly as new challenges arise. Such collaborative self-organization is only possible when employees are intimately aware of each others interests, strengths, and idiosyncrasies.

Collective intelligence, as previously discussed in this journal, is not a new concept, and it is certainly not a "2.0" concept. Even jaded skeptics will admit that most of us have experienced it: remember that sports team you belonged to that had a special feel to it, or a band you played in,  or perhaps you belonged to a group that always seemed to create energy just because you met together?  What are the characteristics of such groups or activities such that the outcome of the group is more than the sum of the individuals? Jean-Francois Noubel offers the following characteristics:

1) Emergence - a "spirit" or "personality" in a group. More formally, a new set of properties, order, or complexity that is present in the whole, that is not present in the individuals. Think about "The Wave" in a stadium -- looking at any individual the action is quite uninteresting, but look at the entire stadium of individuals and you see the motion of the wave emerge.  Can emergence be designed and managed? I believe so.  For example, the Amazon recommendation engine does a masterful job of creating value out of the marginally valuable actions of individuals.

2) Holoptical space - spaces in which individuals each perceive all of the other members in the group.  Further, holoptical spaces provide perception to the individual of the movements/actions of the group as a whole. In a sports team for example, an individual player can see the progress of the team as a team, not simply the individuals. Many of the Web 2.0 social networking tools aim to increase the reach and efficiency of holoptical spaces by providing real-time insight into all other members' activities and maps of whole-group activity.

3) Social contract - rules of engagement, either explicit or implicit, governing the actions of the group.

4) Polymorphic architecture - relationships and responsibilities dynamically adapt to varying situations and environments.

5) Circulating object-link - the item or concept that brings the group together. Could be a ball (in the case of a sport), a song (in the case of a band), or more abstractly it could be a mission or ideology for a group.

6) Learning organization - a group with a learning process, learning from failures and successes and modifying behaviors, processes, and structures appropriately.

7) Gift economy - as opposed to a competition-economy in which payment is received in exchange for a good or service. In a gift economy, individuals give to the community first, then afterwards realize benefits as a result of benefits experienced by the entire community.

Some collective intelligence characteristics may benefit from the application of Web 2.0 or other social networking and collaboration tools. Others may require process, structure, or cultural change. Strategic leaders who desire to foster a culture of collaboration should think about all of these elements as they apply to their organizations and create specific plans to improve the collective intelligence of their organization. This will safeguard from simply applying "buzz word technologies" in the hopes that change will miraculously result.

There is so much hype about Web 2.0, social media, and collective intelligence that it is really refreshing to read a critical, contrarian perspective, even if you don't happen to agree with it.  Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur is one such perspective.  Keen doesn't pull any punches:

"How today's Internet is killing our culture" (the book's sub-title)

"...the blind leading the blind" (describing Wikipedia)

"...creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity" (output of Web 2.0)

"One chilling reality in this brave new digital epoch is the blurring, obfuscation, and even disappearance of truth."

"Ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule" (definition of Web 2.0) 

Keen makes a couple of good points, but in the end goes astray badly. He raises the issue of expertise and experience being overwhelmed by "amateurs". He cites the case of Wikipedia, for example, where a PhD in astronomy can get edited out by a backyard stargazer.  What do you base your trust of information on? On credentials or authority? On majority vote? On popularity of an opinion? On how many clicks somebody gets? This actually touches on philosophical issues, as witnessed by Keen's fear about the "disappearance of truth". Keen is admittedly a modernist as opposed to a post-modernist. Therefore, he places a lot of trust in authority, and "objective truth". He feels that the Web 2.0 culture is creating nothing but a post-modern collection of opinions instead of truth.  Without going into a full discourse on modernism versus postmodermism (and how to avoid the excesses of both viewpoints), let me instead point out Keen's glaring, and deadly mistake: He makes much of experts such as journalists who in his opinion provide objective, truthful reporting. Come on!!!  An article written in the New York Times is just as biased as a blog entry -- what is important is to have discipline to discern these biases (of course recognizing that we have our own biases affecting our ability to identify biases :-) , and transparency on the part of the source to  "bare their biases".  Holding on to a delusion that experts are unbiased and therefore the only ones capable of discovering or expounding on truth, is simply inexcusable.

This does raise the issue of transparency in the Web 2.0 world, however. Keen gives examples of disingenuous blogging and advertising masquerading as "content." This is a very real issue that must be addressed. Of course Keen isn't alone in his views. Jaron Lanier has written a very interesting essay called Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. I think Lanier has a much more balanced perspective than Keen. Here is a stellar quote from Lanier's essay:

"In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion."

What is needed in the Web 2.0 world are trusted mechanisms to connect content to sources (persons) and their "credentials", giving content consumers the information they need to determine how much credibility to give the source and the content. EBAY is attempting this in a restricted sense with the tracking of reputation of buyers and sellers; Technorati with their concept of "Authority" for blogs.  Fortunately, transparency is not typically an issue for Web 2.0 within the enterprise because content contributors are known, along with their credentials, achievements, and organizational authority. Imagine this extended to all content on the web! Keen points to Citizendium as an example of a hybrid Web 2.0 project that attempts to combine the best of Wikipedia with "gentle expert oversight" and a focus on "credibility and quality, not just quantity". I hope we see more of this type of offering.

Perhaps Keen's most salient point is hidden in his moaning about how newspaper and music companies are losing revenues. I don't care about dinosaur business institutions losing money -- shame on them for not adapting to a new world. What concerns me is the potential loss of incentive for experts and artists to develop their knowledge and/or skills. We certainly DON'T want a world where nobody excels in knowledge or talent. Our world would suffer in this case. I believe that business models must be developed to reward true experts and artists who produce superior content (could be an article, a piece of music, a blog posting).  This doesn't mean there is no room for offerings from novices, dilettantes, or even morons.  The market will need to assign value to content based on the source, as well as "2.0 credentials" such as popularity, link frequency, and the like.

So rather than just trash Web 2.0,  let's put our collective intelligence into figuring out sustainable Web 2.0 business models where market forces are allowed to produce rational determinations of value and content is differentiated and rewarded appropriately.